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Purveyor of Silliness, Esq.

This is why Trump scares the establishment, I think.. It's not his antienvironmentalism or anti-migrant stuff or whatever. It's the fact that he managed to get elected largely outside of the lobby system. That means he can't be controlled by the usual mechanisms! He's beholden (almost) entirely to his electorate. That's unheard-of.

I wouldn't say Trump is outside the lobby system. I'd say he bypassed the lobbyist (aka the agenda people) and moved straight to the backers (aka the people with money who have agendas). About the only electorate Trump is worried about would be the Electoral College, I'd say.

Edit: changed 'removed' to 'bypass'

Hottake: Being cynical doesn’t automatically make you smart, sometimes it makes you a smug asshole.

Active member

I wouldn't say Trump is outside the lobby system. I'd say he bypassed the lobbyist (aka the agenda people) and moved straight to the backers (aka the people with money who have agendas). About the only electorate Trump is worried about would be the Electoral College, I'd say.

I don't know who you're referring to when you mean the people with money who have agendas. (?) You are differentiating the people with influence from the people who they hire to spread their influence?

I mean that the usual pattern is Candidate Evil get lots of money from Bank Greed, and then when elected he promotes Bank Greed in exchange. Trump bypassed that' he didn't win through the efforts of other people's money, but by appealing to the electorate.

_His_ electorate, not the people in general. Sure he lost the popular vote. He does care about his electorate though; at least it seems that way to me.

Gone

Five people were killed in an active shooter situation in Midland and Odessa on Saturday afternoon. The suspect in the shooting has been shot and killed.

www.cbs7.com

5 dead, 20 injured

“‘No way to prevent this’ says only nation where this regularly happens”

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi”.

Gone

Oops, missed that one. Noone dead, but 10 injured at a school football game.

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi”.

Yokkiziikzekker

Our dreams of conquering the heavens are about to morph into a hell-bound nightmare. When a team of scientists, engineers and pioneers take the first steps toward an FTL drive, they unwittingly unleash a horror the likes of which no human, transhuman or AI before - or after - has ever before witnessed.
The event sends shockwaves across space and time. Planets and governments are on the brink of war. An arms race the likes of which our universe has never seen is underway. And something else has the Solar System as a whole in its crosshairs,
and it approaches with a fury hotter than the Sun,
and faster than...

Gone

Apparently just posting “thoughts and prayers” is an infraction on SB in these threads. Now if only it could be one for the Republican politicians too.

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi”.

Gone

Neither is offering thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting while taking no action to take guns away or to address the rightwing rhetoric that causes most of the mass shootings outside of gang wars.

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi”.

Active member

Neither is offering thoughts and prayers after a mass shooting while taking no action to take guns away or to address the rightwing rhetoric that causes most of the mass shootings outside of gang wars.

You mean a list that doesn’t discuss motives at all? There’s a great source for determining motives!

Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but because out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is “Nazi”.

Active member

As I said, the instances that have their own wiki pages show a variety of motives.

I have a crazy idea. When you have a complicated phenomenon, you should acquire data about it, then construct hypotheses, and test the hypotheses. This is the opposite of instantly assuming that everything is racism and/or video games or whatever one's ideological bugbear is.

As I have said multiple times, this mass-shooting phenomenon started around 1980 and picked up speed since then. If you want to understand the phenomenon, you want to look at that. Did racists only appear in 1980?

Weirdly enough, the current wave coincides with a plunge in crime overall. Weird huh?

Yokkiziikzekker

Their "underlying" motive seems tbh to be to commit terrorist attacks based on extremism (usually ethno-nationalist and/or fascist in nature).

Our dreams of conquering the heavens are about to morph into a hell-bound nightmare. When a team of scientists, engineers and pioneers take the first steps toward an FTL drive, they unwittingly unleash a horror the likes of which no human, transhuman or AI before - or after - has ever before witnessed.
The event sends shockwaves across space and time. Planets and governments are on the brink of war. An arms race the likes of which our universe has never seen is underway. And something else has the Solar System as a whole in its crosshairs,
and it approaches with a fury hotter than the Sun,
and faster than...

The Virginia Beach shooting has already been declared different from other attacks. The STEM shooting was vindictive teen drama (and "mental illness" likely had little to do with it) and the UNC Charlotte killer, while lacking clear motive, had a clear target. The most recent are too early to have anything worthwhile on regardless. Furthermore, if you actually do research beyond this past year (going a bit beyond Wikipedia of all places also helps) you'll find a very different picture.

Edit:

We've got three, maybe four, white supremacist types, a bunch of psychotics, a couple of "I hate the world in general", and a bunch of unknowns. There's probably overlap between psychotics and others.

Our dreams of conquering the heavens are about to morph into a hell-bound nightmare. When a team of scientists, engineers and pioneers take the first steps toward an FTL drive, they unwittingly unleash a horror the likes of which no human, transhuman or AI before - or after - has ever before witnessed.
The event sends shockwaves across space and time. Planets and governments are on the brink of war. An arms race the likes of which our universe has never seen is underway. And something else has the Solar System as a whole in its crosshairs,
and it approaches with a fury hotter than the Sun,
and faster than...

Active member

The Virginia Beach shooting has already been declared different from other attacks. The STEM shooting was vindictive teen drama (and "mental illness" likely had little to do with it) and the UNC Charlotte killer, while lacking clear motive, had a clear target. The most recent are too early to have anything worthwhile on regardless. Furthermore, if you actually do research beyond this past year (going a bit beyond Wikipedia of all places also helps) you'll find a very different picture.

OK, then enlighten me. What % of mass shootings are deliberate terrorist attacks, what are the result of psychosis, and what are other things?

I thought we were arguing about the motives behind mass shootings in general, and not the terrorist ones specifically -- in which case "their motives are terrorist" is kind of tautological, no?

Maybe it's coincidental, but it just popped into my head that this stuff starts at the same time as the near-disappearance of the organized terrorism of the 60s and 70s. Maybe these guys would have joined the KKK or Weathermen if they had lived earlier.

EDIT: but the likelihood of one's own death is a totally different thing

Asocial Quasisocialist

Maybe it's coincidental, but it just popped into my head that this stuff starts at the same time as the near-disappearance of the organized terrorism of the 60s and 70s. Maybe these guys would have joined the KKK or Weathermen if they had lived earlier.

Might this tie into rise of the "lone wolf" strategy employed by the far right after their more organised groups were infiltrated. Leading into an environment with a continuos tradition of far right terrorism in the USA while it's left wing counterpart withered away and did not leave successor groups.

As a result terrorist mass shootings in the USA are not evenly split among all ideologies.

And "bad people just decide to become terrorist at a fixed percentage" is not the mainstream view on political terrorism. Instead radicalisation and organised communities to provide emotional and social support are seen as being a key factor in endemic terrorism. It is in my view the decades long tradition of far right communities promoting "lone wolves" combined with the modern online alt-right radicalisation pipeline, is to blame for the regular white supremacist mass shootings in the USA rather than mass shooters being psychotic.

Under that pragmatism, you pretty quickly land on something disturbingly similar to Fascism as the ideal form of government to handle human nature, as it targets the more common and harder to resist Tribalism of humanity as its driver, whereas Liberalism uses Greed as its motivating flaw, which is both non-universal and vastly harder to keep in line.